Staff

Special Seminar: Ken Bloom, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, "How to do Particle Physics in a Climate Emergency?"

The pursuit of particle physics, or any kind of discovery-driven research, requires a stable and prosperous society. Today, our society is increasingly threatened by global climate change. Human-influenced climate change has already impacted weather patterns, and global warming will only increase unless deep reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are achieved.

NPA Seminar, Yikun Wang, Caltech, “Axion Detection with Optomechanical Cavities”

In this talk, I will present our recent proposal of searching for axion dark matter with an optomechanical cavity filled with a material such as superfluid helium. Axion absorption converts a pump laser photon to a photon plus a phonon. The axion absorption rate is enhanced by the high occupation number of coherent photons or phonons in the cavity, allowing our proposal to largely overcome the extremely small axion coupling. The axion mass probed is set by the relative frequency of the photon produced in the final state and the Stokes mode.

NPA Seminar, Tereza Kroupová, University of Pennsylvania, "Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay and the SNO+ Experiment"

One of the biggest questions in fundamental particle physics is whether neutrinos are Dirac fermions, with distinct anti-particles, or Majorana fermions, for which the particles and anti-particles are identical. The best available probe of the neutrino nature is neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ), a hypothetical process that require massive Majorana neutrinos. This discovery of this lepton number violating process would therefore reveal the neutrino nature and provide a window into physics beyond the Standard Model.

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